The Very-Many-Questions-Not-Worth-Their-Own-Thread Thread 36

[aimeeandbeatles]

Wasn't this on camera? There's no way they have the wrong guy.

Just because the evidence is there doesn't mean that the rules of law still don't apply. Although the guy is scum he still has the right to appeals and things.

 

[caketastydelish]

It’s already been a few years though. How long is this supposed to take?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Sometimes it takes decades. There's a guy from my city who's been on death row in Montana since the early 1980s. If he hadn't asked for the death penalty (and changed his mind later and begun a series of appeals), he would likely have served his sentence and been out.

Not that this excuses his crime; he was convicted of killing two men. However, Canada doesn't like its citizens to be executed in foreign countries, so the case drags on.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

The legal system is also rather notoriously slow. Even in a clear-cut case it sometimes takes months for someone to get charged and brought in front of a judge. Two years really isn't very long at all in the court.

 

[Cutlass]

Wasn't this on camera? There's no way they have the wrong guy.

That's not the point. The point is that if you stop using the process, you'll stop using it in the wrong circumstances.

 

[rah]

Besides, he's white. I'm sure if he wasn't, it would be sped up.

 

[Traitorfish]

It's honestly baffling to me that the United States maintains the death penalty. In most practical terms, it has already been abolished: death sentences are rarely handed down, and even more rarely carried out. They execute maybe two dozen people a year. Most of the states, containing most of the people, don't practice it at all. But enough voters in enough of the states are in favour of the abstract notion of the death penalty, that they're willing to spend millions of dollars annually just to get those two dozens.

Doubly baffling that most of these voters like to think of themselves as both pro-life and anti-deficit.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Doubly baffling that most of these voters like to think of themselves as both pro-life and anti-deficit.

There's also a significant overlap between "pro-life" voters and the anti-welfare voters, too. I've seen people arguing against free school lunches (though admittedly that was at the rather extreme end).

 

[civvver]

It's honestly baffling to me that the United States maintains the death penalty. In most practical terms, it has already been abolished: death sentences are rarely handed down, and even more rarely carried out. They execute maybe two dozen people a year. Most of the states, containing most of the people, don't practice it at all. But enough voters in enough of the states are in favour of the abstract notion of the death penalty, that they're willing to spend millions of dollars annually just to get those two dozens.

Doubly baffling that most of these voters like to think of themselves as both pro-life and anti-deficit.

pretty sure it's cheaper to incarcerate for life than to execute someone in the US. People are ill informed. The usual argument is why should that felon continue to live off our tax dollars, take em out back and shoot em! but of course it doesn't actually work like that.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Plus if it happens that later it's discovered they're innocent or that there wasn't a fair trial or something, you can let them out of jail. You can't un-kill somebody.

 

[Cutlass]

It's honestly baffling to me that the United States maintains the death penalty. In most practical terms, it has already been abolished: death sentences are rarely handed down, and even more rarely carried out. They execute maybe two dozen people a year. Most of the states, containing most of the people, don't practice it at all. But enough voters in enough of the states are in favour of the abstract notion of the death penalty, that they're willing to spend millions of dollars annually just to get those two dozens.

Doubly baffling that most of these voters like to think of themselves as both pro-life and anti-deficit.

It's fundamentally about authoritarianism. All the other things they claim to be for or against all boil down to the fact that they think that they should control others, and that others should be controlled by them.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

While googling for information on a publisher imprint, I came across this result (ignore the block button, that's a userscript):

However, the snippet of text displayed was locked behind a paywall. (Rather amusingly, searching for the except phrase brought up a second link from the same site...with the full text.) How does this happen?

 

[The_J]

Some of the newspapers with paywall allow you to access a limited amount of articles if you come in via a search engine, but not directly via the site (and first you probably landed on the page for the abstract, and not for the full article).
Taylor and Francis are a scientific publisher though, so I don't think they're doing that... but who knows?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I actually fudged my useragent to display as one of the Googlebots, but it still gave me a paywall. Hm.

 

[The_J]

Then it's something different I guess .

 

[Synobun]

Some journal distributors use an algorithm for its summaries where they just rip specific sentences from specific paragraphs. I wouldn't be surprised if they used something similar for their meta tags since it's so poorly formatted. Google will go with your manually set tags if they're valid instead of generating their own.

This is just a guess, however.

 

[The_J]

Really, that happens? Never seen that. Can't be good publishers then, I guess.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

There's something wrong with my closet where the door is too tight in the frame in one corner and it takes a lot of effort to open. Leaving it partly open isn't really an option because the cats will go in and knock everything down. Any suggestions on how to deal with this?

 

[Takhisis]

Is it a sliding door?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

No, a normal open/close one. It looks like the one stuck corner kind of swelled up a little bit if that makes any sense. It's bulging at the edges.